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by 2fast4you 1239 days ago
Your anecdote gave me an idea. What if we use AI to enhance the communication between people instead of replacing the people?

Imagine you give a problem statement to the LLM, then it tried to find all the subtleties, confusing parts, room for interpretation, etc. All of the people involved revise the problem statement to make it more clear and give it back to the LLM. Iterate like that until satisfied

3 comments

Hm. I like your idea! It's one of the few that I think have a chance of working in practice.

In my experience, there is great value in describing your ideas to people who don't have the background to fully understand them, don't really care about them, and are in a bit of a trollish mood - the ways in which they misunderstand what you're saying, or pick on (what you think are) random, irrelevant things, is highly informative. The feedback you get from such people makes you think about things and in ways you wouldn't have thought otherwise.

The problem is, of course, you generally don't have a pool of such people available 24/7. However, LLMs today seem like they could fit this role just fine. They can't and won't understand the point you're trying to get across - but they can and will (if asked) pattern-match on vague language, logical jumps, sentences with multiple meanings, etc. They'll get it subtly wrong, too - much like a bored friend who's mostly focused on playing Angry Birds and hears only every third sentence of your monologue, and then blurts something to keep you talking for the next 30 seconds so they can focus on aiming the birds at the towers of pigs.

I would totally use a LLM-backed tool optimized to facilitate such conversation sessions. I actually tried this in the past, in AI Dungeons, and results were encouraging (i.e. responses got me to think in ways I normally don't).

If you’ve had some success with an existing model, I think I’ll explore the idea with GPT3! Getting the prompt right is gonna be tricky, do you remember how you got AI Dungeons to play along?
I'd set up a basic story prompt, describing the roles and personalities of my character and a few NPCs, as well as relationships between all of them. I would then introduce my idea in form of a role-play, usually with my character blurting it out - then let the language model fill in reactions of other characters. From then, I'd just play along with the story.

It wasn't the most efficient way of extracting commentary out of a language model - particularly out of one that was optimized to generate plot twists and setting changes instead - but it was a very fun way.

Asking the right question is surprisingly hard sometimes. I'd love a tool I could converse with to come up with a question at the core of my thoughts.
Rubber Duck AI chat bot, you explain your problem and it critiques your wording leading you sharpen your argument.
> Rubber Duck AI chat bot

This sounds more like friendly AI than [different] "Devil's Advocate chat bot."

That sounds like something I’d use
I really don't know why you think an AI as we currently have it could do this when it can't get these queries exactly right.
I really don’t know why you feel the need to point this out when I made no claims about feasibility. I think it’s worth exploring even if our current tech isn’t up to it.